Eugenics/Euthanasia
The eugenics movement, both in the United States and in Europe, had its roots in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the application of this theory to human beings. But Darwin’s ideas were not the only impetus behind the development of eugenics.
This movement was also influenced by early criminology, scientific racism, and sociological studies of the poor. Each of these strands blended together gave rise to the eugenics movement, whose goal was to improve the genetic pool through selective breeding, thereby eliminating the weaker elements in society and reinforcing Darwin’s ideas regarding the survival of the fittest. These weaker elements were to be found often in one or more of the following categories: the working class, the mentally or physically handicapped, those with a criminal record, and non-Caucasians and/or Jewish people. Scientists, working together with politicians and social workers, developed public policy regarding sterilization and, in the case of Nazi Germany, murder, all under the guise of furthering and strengthening certain genetic qualities of the human race. However, although many intellectuals and scientists in the United States dismissed these early theories by the interwar period, in Germany they found fertile ground with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.In the mid-1800s, several European intellectuals wrote about the possibilities of eugenics and reinforced their ideas with contemporary assumptions about the inequality among classes and races, neither of which could be proven scientifically. The French thinker Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau proposed a hierarchy of races in 1853 in his work The Inequality of Human Races. He believed that the pattern of human history evidenced the struggle between the races and demonstrated that certain races (white Europeans) were destined to greatness, whereas other races (nonwhites) were destined to be ruled or controlled by the superior races.
He emphasized what he perceived as the dangers in race mixing, which he labeled as degeneration, conjecturing that it would weaken the purer, stronger white race. This theory of degeneration, according to de Gobineau and Benedict Augustin Morel, stated that weak hereditary characteristics would worsen with each successive generation; if a man suffered from a nervous disorder, then his child would be neurotic and his grandchild would be insane. Given the extensive European global empire structure, de Gobineau believed that the mingling of Europeans with nonEuropeans presented a serious danger to the superior place of Europeans. His work began a pattern of science buttressing prevailing stereotypes and beliefs that persisted into the middle of the twentieth century and that led in multiple directions, including sterilization and murder.De Gobineau’s racial hierarchy was perpetuated by other European intellectuals such as the German composer Richard Wagner; his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain; and Paul de Lagarde. This trio of thinkers believed that the Jewish “race” was the most degraded of all and warned of their enormous potential for corrupting the “purer” races. These beliefs led to the coining of a new word, antisemitism, in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr. Prior to this time, when referring to hatred of Jews, the term Judenhass was used. However, tying into the desire to link racism with science, these intellectuals saw the need for a more modern term that emphasized the supposed race of Jews, rather than their religion. For this strain of eu- genicists and racists, Jews represented the most degenerate of all the races, given to parasitical behavior. The process of Jewish assimilation into European culture, sparked by the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Code, hastened their fears that Jews were infiltrating Western Christian society and contaminating its racial purity through intermarriage.
Criminologists such as the Italian professor of legal medicine, Cesare Lombroso, were also key figures in the early development of eugenics.
He theorized that criminals were people whose physical and mental capacities had not fully developed. He identified certain physical characteristics, such as a sloping forehead, long arms, large incisors, and lack of symmetry in facial features, and patterns of behavior, such as emotionality and inconstancy, as indicators of stunted development and one’s tendency toward immoral and/or criminal acts. He also labeled certain groups within society as hereditarily predisposed to criminality, including both the handicapped and gypsies. He presented his ideas in his 1863 work, Genius and Madness, which argued that criminality was habitual because it was hereditary. Criminals with his identified physical and behavioral characteristics were a constant threat to society and could never be reformed; therefore, he recommended that they be put to death by the state. Lombroso’s ideas found favor in the United States with many American scholars, particularly those who managed prisons and asylums.Another key figure in the intellectual development of eugenics theory was the Englishman Francis Galton. In his work, Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton posited that the racial health of a people was dictated by their natural, inherited characteristics and formulated thirteen criteria on which people should be judged. The way to ensure national strength was to encourage those with all or most of his identified characteristics to have many children, while dissuading the hereditarily weak from giving birth. Within the so-called positive characteristics were many stereotypically middle-class attributes such as character, work ethic, height, and intelligence. His work was read widely across Europe and the United States.
Within the United States, the early proponents of the eugenics movement were clustered around those who cared for the mentally and/or physically handicapped or criminals and those who studied the roots of poverty and immorality. Its underpinning was threefold: the Progressive Era, which sought to eradicate ills, corruption, and weaknesses in society and politics; the growing belief that heredity dictated strengths and weaknesses in human development; and increasing anti-immigrant sentiments, particularly directed against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
This manifested itself in the form of mandatory sterilization laws and laws preventing marriage between people labeled as “degenerate” in the early 1900s. Prisons, asylums, and homes for delinquent youth became “laboratories” for testing basic assumptions about degeneracy and heredity.In the United States, the most common “cure” was to remove these lesser beings from the gene pool by forced sterilization and/or castration. This extreme measure was first instituted by F. Hoyt Pilcher, the superintendent of the Kansas State Home for the Feebleminded. In the mid-1890s, Pilcher castrated forty-four boys and sterilized fourteen girls to stop them from procreating. Medical science soon thereafter offered the less extreme options of tubal ligation and vasectomy. This part of the movement culminated with the Indiana legislature passing the first law mandating the sterilization of habitual criminals, the mentally handicapped, and rapists who were housed in a state institution, once their case had been reviewed by a panel of experts. By 1917, a total of sixteen states (including Indiana) had passed such legislation (California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin). In the interwar period, fourteen additional states enacted forcible sterilization laws (Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia). By 1931, more than 12,000 people in the United States had been sterilized (Haller 1984, 133-134, 137, 141).
Another strand was the prohibition of the marriage of certain types of people. In 1896, Connecticut passed legislation forbidding the marriage of a mentally handicapped person, the first such legislation in the United States. By 1905, five other states (Kansas, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana) had enacted similar laws, some with even further-reaching restrictions, such as forbidding alcoholics to get married.
By the mid-1950s, laws prohibiting the marriage of mentally handicapped persons existed in forty-one states, of epileptics in seventeen states, and of alcoholics in four states. With these actions, the United States became the first government to endorse compulsory sterilization laws.In the early 1900s, Charles Benedict Davenport founded a series of institutions, including the Eugenics Records Office and the Eugenics Research Association, at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Davenport was trained as a biologist, anthropologist, and eugenicist and worked closely with well-established racist theorists such as Madison Grant. Under his leadership and that of his institutions’ manager, Harry Hamilton Laughlin, they influenced the development of public policy on sterilization, marriage prohibition, and decreasing immigration, the last most notably through the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. In the 1930s, Laughlin and Davenport praised the sterilization laws passed by the Third Reich in their newsletter, Eugenic News. In addition, Davenport published his research in German scientific journals and served on two journals’ editorial boards throughout the 1930s, severing his ties much later than most other American eugenicists.
In addition to the exchange of scientific information via publications, eugeni- cists held a series of meeting in the early 1900s that allowed them to meet and share ideas directly, through the International Society for Racial Hygiene (ISRH), an organization heavily influenced by German eugenicists, which first met in Dresden in 1907 and later in London in 1912. Although these contacts were temporarily lessened due to World War I, they emerged once more in the 1920s, as scientists in Germany were strengthening their support for legislation dealing with those “unworthy of life.” German scientists remained isolated from the international eugenics movement until 1925, when Germany was reintegrated into the international community.
An important result of renewed contact was extensive financial assistance given by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s to support German research in eugenics and to provide funds for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity. These two German institutes pushed for government support and legal processes to ensure the genetic health of Germany and played a central role in the formation of public policy. In 1932, the Prussian Parliament held discussions on a proposed sterilization law, based on those of multiple American states and Switzerland. The drive to institute eugenics at the national level began shortly after President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.For scientists (centered in the German Society for Race Hygiene and these two aforementioned institutes) and the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), racial purity and good birth were of utmost importance. They feared that the strongest and purest people within society were having too few children, while the weakest people were having too many. Therefore, they instituted policies and programs to reverse this imbalance. One element of their policy was the development of the Lebensborn (Well of Life) program, under the leadership of the Schutzstaffel (SS). This program began as a series of boarding homes for unwed mothers of pure Aryan race and developed over the 1930s into a selective breeding program. After women gave birth, the state encouraged them to leave the children in its care. At least 12,000 children were born into the Lebensborn program between 1938 and 1945. A second part of this program coordinated the selection of racially pure children from eastern European countries occupied by the Third Reich, who were taken from their homes and adopted by German families. Estimates of the number of kidnapped children range from 100,000 to 250,000 (Carlson 2001, 328).
The sterilization program of the Third Reich began in July 1933, when the German Reichstag passed the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases. It stated that anyone with a hereditary illness could be sterilized against his or her will if a medical expert determined that he or she was likely to produce children with a serious hereditary defect and was based on several state laws passed in the United States. According to this law, hereditary illness was characterized by one of the following conditions: congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness or deafness, serious physical deformities, or chronic alcoholism. The majority of people sterilized against their will were deemed congenitally feebleminded, yet no clear, scientific definition and/or test existed to detect this condition. Decisions were, therefore, often arbitrary. A person could recommend himself or herself for sterilization, but the vast majority of the recommendations came from physicians, nurses, or the administrative heads of homes, hospitals, and prisons.
The decision to sterilize someone in Germany was made by a newly created Hereditary Health Court, which was composed of one judge and two physicians. If the court decided in favor of sterilization, there was no path of appeal, and the court did not consider whether the person was in favor of the sterilization or not. Some 300,000 German citizens had been sterilized under this program by 1939; during the course of the war, an additional 50,000 to 75,000 people underwent forcible sterilization. Therefore, approximately 0.5 percent of the German population was directly affected by this program (Friedlander 1995, 30).
In the United States, some American scientists began to question the path that Nazi eugenicists had chosen, marking a widening gap in practice and support between the two scientific communities. By the late 1930s, American scientists such as Franz Boas, a prominent anthropologist and professor at Columbia University, directly and publicly attacked the policies and beliefs of the Third Reich. Within mainstream organizations such as the American Eugenics Society, social eugeni- cists took positions of power away from racial eugenicists. Scientific support for sterilization laws and practice was not waning; rather, there was a shift in focus from sterilization based upon race or antisemitism to sterilization based upon social factors such as government support for larger families of “superior” genetic background. Indeed, forced sterilization continued in the United States until the 1970s, totaling more than 62,000, of which more than 20,000 (32 percent) were sterilized by the state of California (Haller 1984, 141).
The Third Reich’s eugenics program led directly to mass murder through the euthanasia program known as T-4, which
killed mentally and physically handicapped children and adults, and the Holocaust, which built upon this mindset of eliminating those seen as “lesser,” or genetically inferior. The German and American scientific communities were reconnected after World War II during the Nuremburg Doctors’ Trials, held in 1946. These trials focused on medical professionals who were involved in the T-4 program and/or medical experiments conducted in concentration camps and killing centers. However, U.S. prosecutors did not charge those involved with the forced sterilization of more than 3,500,000 German citizens, making a distinction between “genuine” eugenics and the mass killings. In the long term, these German eugenicists, even many who were involved with mass murder, were quickly reintegrated into the international scientific community, often with the assistance of U.S. scientists.
Laura J. Hilton
See also Antisemitism; U.S.-German
Intellectual Exchange
References and Further Reading
Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Carlson, Elof Axel. The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001.
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Haller, Mark. Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984.
Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mosse, George. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.